[eng] From the outset, the design of electromechanical converters was limited to the optimization, by electrical engineers, of the conversion of electrical energy to mechanical energy.
The latter was at that time nearly exclusively provided under the form of single degree of freedom motion, more often rotary, and had to be adapted, by mechanical engineers, to the needs of the system to be actuated.
Today, thanks to recent evolutions in fields as various as power electronics, computer capabilities or computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD-CAM), it has become possible to design new actuators by taking directly into account the needs of the applications they are intended for. As a result, actuators with several degrees of freedom, both in rotation and in translation, have been developed.
Within this context, this thesis pursues two objectives. The first consists in proposing a new design method integrating as best as possible the electrical and mechanical aspects of electromechanical systems such as these new actuators. More broadly, its vocation is to be applicable to all multidisciplinary problems where taking into account each discipline and their interactions are necessary to ensure the global performances of the final product. More particularly, this method is adapted to the case of researches that, contrary to the case of other developments, sometimes includes badly mastered concepts.
The second aim is to apply this approach to the design of an electrical motor with a spherical rotor actuated, with an unlimited angular range, along two of the three degrees of freedom it possesses in rotation. Following the basic steps involved in this approach, various solution concepts were first generated both for the electrical actuation aspects and the mechanical guiding aspects. These concepts were then characterized, via a number of modeling and experimentation phases, before being combined in order to obtain a global solution, which was then sized, manufactured and validated on a test bench.